Purgatory: Canto XV -- Love -- it's a burning thing

Welcome to the first of the three most important cantos in the entire Comedy (which is more than just my opinion). These three cantos stress the ideal of love, and they are situated right in the center of the comedy, numbering 49, 50, and 51. Like canto 19 of La Vita Nuova, Dante might admonish that "if anyone is not intelligent enough to understand it from the divisions already made, I would not mind in the least if he would simply leave my poem alone" (22). Love is an opaque concept to those who willingly close their hearts to God and the Christifideles. Dante's attempt to unveil the obscurity in a poem beginning with the line, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" (Ladies who have intelligence of love), then, is similar to his attempt to unveil the obscurity of love in the clearing away of the stinging and blinding smoke that greets us pilgrims on this ledge as we visit those who are in the process of addressing their deficits in meekness.



We learn in this canto that Dante still harbors a great deal of anger against those who would later betray him in Florence. Wrath, Ciardi points out, is the blood brother of pride, and Dante's ease at passing through envy (and getting the second P removed from his brow -- notice, Fr. Earl, that the others indeed do not grow fainter, marking pride as the thing that most underscores all of them) is contrasted sharply with the attitude he takes here on the cornice of wrath, and his reflections on the whip of wrath, on the three scenes that cause him to stumble about blindly (as if in a fog, which hasn't yet happened) are sufficient to cause Virgil to call Dante out of his reverie and remind him that he needs to shake these feelings and reactions off. The reason for Virgil's concern is not only that he sees Dante show signs of this vice in ways different from how he reacted to the cornices of pride and envy, but also because of what Pope will have to come to terms with -- that virtue and vice do not operate in a yin-yang relationship where vice is virtue's opposite but that vice is a deficit of virtue, which is our true nature. Virtue, on the other hand, is not a deficit of vice, and this is why virtue is the greater good and why we should not confuse the two. Dante's feeling wrath here, then, is inappropriate when he should be striving for meekness, and what he will be called to do is, like St. Katharine Drexel, put aside the oppressions of his own spirit and openly walk toward God.

All of this comes upon them at once and interrupts (complements, rather) what is merely a prelude to a great story -- a tale of the nature of love, something that once divided and shared multiplies more than were it to remain intact and in the possession of a single person. Dante has been reflecting on this since taking his leave of Guido del Duca who "spoke of 'sharing' and said it was 'forbidden'" (45). Material wealth, once divided, is halved, but were everyone to "turned ]their longing] upward, then [humanity's] hearts/ would never be consumed by such a fear;/ for the more there are there who say 'ours'--not 'mine'--/by that much is each richer, and the brighter within that cloister burns the Love Divine" (53-7). In short, community is better than solitude, and that which edifies the Christifideles edifies each person within it, for "as mirror reflects mirros, so, above,/ the more there are who join their souls, the more/ Love learns perfection, and the more they love" (73-5). Virgil concludes the contribution that human reason can provide to this phenomenon by once more referring Dante's question towards Beatrice.

S.